Surely you have ever wondered why there are so many users who get lost on their way to a sale or conversion. Abandoned carts are a common phenomenon in all e-commerce, but of course our job is to find out where and why this phenomenon occurs in order to try to remedy it. To help us in this arduous task, Analytics allows us to configure a conversion funnel which is neither more nor less than the path that users follow on a website to reach a given objective that you have previously set (making a purchase, filling out a form, requesting a quote, etc.).
For example, in an online store whose objective is the purchase, we could have a conversion funnel similar to this one:
Well, from Analytics we can configure a conversion funnel in a simple way. How?
In the section "Manage"in the section "View"we select "Objectives".
In the creation of the New Objective we have three steps to perform: target configuration, target description and target information. As there is no better way to understand things than with an example, we will try to explain it in a practical way.
Target configuration
In this section you will be asked to choose between template, customization or smart targets. The option to choose for the target of purchase would be the first.
Description
In this step Analytics allows you to define four types of goals that users can perform during the session. In our case, the goal to set up the conversion funnel in order to get the customer to buy is Destination.
This objective is met when the user arrives at a certain web page, usually a thank you page.
It is necessary to emphasize one thing in this section. If on your website the order confirmation URL varies depending on the payment method used, you have two options:
- Create a target for each payment method.
- Use regular expressions to include several URLs in the same target. This choice would be the most advisable since you would have the three payment methods in the same funnel and you would be able to perform a joint analysis.
If you still don't know regular expressions, we leave you the Google help where they teach you how to use them: Regular Expressions
Information
In this section you must specify the match to the destination URL so that Analytics can recognize it.
- Equal to: the url has an exact match. This would be our case.
- Start withWe use it if the url that we want to put as destination is dynamic, that is to say, if for example, the last parameter of the url changes according to the user who performs the action. In this case, we would select as destination url the part that does not include this last parameter.
- Regular extensionwould be used if we wanted to target any page in a subdirectory, without specifying which one.
Finally, you should activate the conversion funnel and define the sequence of steps that the user will take on the website at the moment he/she starts the purchase process. To select these steps it would be logical to make a test purchase and locate the different URLs.
And that's it! You would already have created your funnel of conversion!
This way you could already analyze the traffic in your funnel in the Conversion Report > Goals > Conversion Funnel Chart. You will get a lot of interesting information about the behavior of users within it and you can make timely decisions about it to help improve the buying process or recruitment on your website.
If you would still like to analyze in more depth the abandonment rate during the conversion process, you can rely on the Goal Flow Report to examine in detail and detect the problem. But we will talk about this in another post later 😉.
Still, if you want to take a look at other related posts you can click on this post written by my colleague Paula Martinez: Google Analytics Basic Guide - Geotelecom
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